Harry Stone’s War Diaries 1942-44

My father was given the first of his three war diaries by my mother on the 28th. of November 1942. “To my Dear Husband, With Love, From Your Dear Wife” is inscribed in the front of the book. They had been married on the 10th. of October.

Dad was to become very diligent in recording his experiences of war in his diaries, making a point of adding something, even if nothing much had happened, every day that he was overseas. The only exception he made was at the end of October 1943, when he was part of the invasion of Mono Island. He wrote those two or three days up as soon as he had been established with F Troop on Stirling Island.

In the years before his death in 1994, Dad had taken on the task of transcribing his diaries on a portable mechanical typewriter. Most times I visited him he would be typing away at the kitchen table. The original handwritten diaries were on the table next to him, and as I looked over his shoulder at what he was doing it didn’t take long for me to notice that there were occasionally black lines through sections that he had obviously decided to leave out. I gently confronted him about this, telling him that he shouldn’t tamper with what had become, for better or worse, a historical record. His response was that there were things in the diary that he would prefer people not to read. Asked for an example, he mentioned a passage describing how he had heard that local women in Noumea had “sold themselves to American troops for a packet of cigarettes.”

At the same time I became aware that as he was striking some material out, I also noticed that he was actually putting more information in! His reasoning was that this would expand on the original content and provide a better context for some of the events he described. 

It was hard to argue with this, except that as I again pointed out to him, the original diaries were historical records and he should not be tampering with them.

When I eventually transcribed the diaries myself in 2010 I had both versions open next to the computer as I worked. When necessary I held the pages up to the light and pieced together what he had crossed out, reinserting the censored sections back into the main text. In fact, there were only a few such crossings out, and they were done in such a way as to not completely obliterate them, as if even he had reservations about permanently expunging them. Although they may have felt like major issues to Harry at the time, from my perspective most of the comments so treated were actually unimportant to the bigger picture of things.

The additional passages that he wrote at the time of transcribing the diaries I have taken care to identify by italicising them and placing them in brackets. I have not demarcated the passages that I reintroduced from the original diaries.